Marcus was swept up into Ransome’s seductive world of gamblers and whores, surrounded by men and women who were all trying to craft a new life for themselves in the bustling port that was welcoming the whole world. Ships put in at the mouth of the Missisippi from every place imaginable, some carrying passengers and others cargo.
Inch by inch, Marcus began to shed the layers of himself that had been bruised by childhood and revolution, and toughened by war and adversity. Surrounded by Ransome’s friends, Marcus often remembered his time among the Brethren—odd though it was to think of Johannes Ettwein and Sister Magdalene in a seedy bar or a whorehouse—and the way that these unlikely allies lived side by side. Marcus began to laugh at Ransome’s jokes, and to share gossip as well as political news when he sat down with his cup of coffee at Lafitte’s tavern.
It was in one of these easy moments that Ransome finally extracted Marcus’s secret from him.
They were smoking cigars and drinking wine at a gambling parlor on St. Charles Avenue. The thick red velvet drapes gave everything a lurid air, and the haze of anxiety rising from the players and the fumes from the tobacco were so thick they practically choked you.
“I’m calling your bluff, Doc.” Ransome threw a handful of tokens into the center of the table.
“You’ve caught me a bit short.” Marcus was out of cash, out of tokens, and out of luck.
“Of course, you could tell me your secret and I’d call us even,” Fayreweather said. It was his standing offer whenever Marcus lost a game of chance.
Marcus laughed. “You never give up, do you, Ransome?”
“Not if death himself was staring me in the face,” Fayreweather said cheerfully. “I’d simply challenge him to a game of monte and sucker him like I do all the others.”
Fayreweather had been teaching Marcus some of the tricks he used on the deep-pocketed visitors to New Orleans. Fanny would adore Ransome, Marcus thought wistfully, remembering his aunt’s bustling household and exuberant spirit. Marcus got lonelier and more nostalgic with every passing year.
“That’s a strange look for a successful man such as yourself,” Fayreweather said. Like all cardsharps, Ransome was a keen observer. “You look positively blue, Doc. Isn’t there something you can prescribe that will cure your doldrums?”
“Just thinking of the folks I left behind.”
“I hear you.” Ransome’s eyes flickered. “We all lost something on our travels here.”
“I lost my life, and got it back again,” Marcus said, staring into the depths of his wine. “I left my home, and returned to it, and left it again. I sailed the seas, and met Ben Franklin, and buried Thomas Paine. I studied at university, and learned more in the streets of Paris in one night than I did in a year in Edinburgh. I loved two women, and had a child, and here I am, alone in New Orleans, drinking sour wine and losing money hand over hand.”
“Ben Franklin, you say?” Ransome chewed on his cigar.
“Yep,” Marcus replied, taking another slug of wine.
“Son, I think he died before you were born.” Fayreweather put his cards on the table. A straight. “If you want to pass as something you’re not, you’ve got to be more careful with your fabrications. For a moment, I almost believed you. But your mention of Franklin—”
“I was born more than fifty years ago,” Marcus said. “I’m a vampire.”
“One of those bloodsuckers Madame D’Arcantel and her friends are always going on about?” Ransome asked.
“They’re witches,” Marcus said. “You can’t believe a word they say.”
“No,” Ransome said, his eyes narrowing. “So why is it that I believe you?”
Marcus shrugged. “Because I’m telling you the truth?”
“Yes, I believe you are—and for the first time, too.”
After that night, Marcus told Ransome more about what it was to be a vampire than he probably should have. He took Ransome hunting in the bayou and demonstrated how he sometimes applied a bit of vampire blood to a wound in order to save a life even though he wasn’t really supposed to. Once again, Marcus had found an unlikely brother, someone like Vanderslice who accepted him for who and what he was.
“Why don’t you just make us all vampires, like you?” Ransome had wondered.
“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Marcus explained. “I made one child—a son—but he fell in with the wrong crowd, and ended up dead.”
“You need to pick smarter children,” Ransome said, eyeing Marcus with open speculation.
“I see. And you think you have what it takes to be a vampire?” Marcus laughed.
“I know I do.” Ransome’s eyes flashed with sudden desire, then returned to normal. “Together, we could make a family that would rule this city for centuries.”
“Not if my grandfather catches wind of it,” Marcus said.
But that didn’t deter Ransome. He offered to pay Marcus to transform him into a vampire. He threatened to expose Marcus to the authorities unless he was made immortal. When Ransome was dying of malaria, that scourge of the city’s watery location, he offered Marcus his gambling den, substantial fortune, and a private house Marcus didn’t know he owned in exchange for his blood. Ransome Fayreweather had, through grift and deceit, amassed enough money to open his own establishment in the old quarter of the city devoted to drinking, gambling, whoring, and other pleasures of the flesh. On a bad day, Ransome brought home a small fortune in revenue. On a good day, he pocketed more money than Croesus. When Ransome showed him a ledger outlining his various properties and investments, Marcus had been stunned—and then admiring.
Against his better judgment, Marcus decided to try fatherhood for a second time. Marcus had no desire to return to life as it had been before Ransome arrived in it: quietly productive with little laughter and much reading of Common Sense. Instead, Marcus wanted to take part in Ransome’s plans to further develop the bar that was known as the Domino Club, and to gather with New Orleans’s spirited citizens at dinner tables and in music halls to celebrate the pleasures of youth.
Marcus administered his blood to his dying friend in the opulent upstairs bedroom in Ransome’s grand new house on Coliseum Street.
Unlike Vanderslice, Ransome took to being a vampire like sucking the blood from humans was second nature. Marcus discovered in Ransome’s bloodlore that he’d been swindling people since he was a boy of eight, taking money from innocents by maneuvering three walnut shells and a kernel of corn atop a cellar door.
Marcus’s medical practice continued to grow after Ransome’s transformation. The city had swollen considerably in size thanks to the continued influx of refugees from the Caribbean, the slave traders who unloaded their captives on the wharves, and the speculators and land developers who arrived in pursuit of their fortune. Such a plan had certainly worked for Ransome, who was now one of the richest men in New Orleans and planned on remaining in that enviable position for the rest of his days.
Ransome’s future depended on him having his own children. He started with a mixed-race man called Malachi Smith—a small, agile fellow who clambered up the sides of houses and broke into bedrooms to steal women’s jewels. Marcus became a grandfather, and with that title came new worries about the family’s increasing notoriety.
Then Ransome adopted Crispin Jones, a young British fellow newly arrived in New Orleans with a head for business and a taste for young men.
“You can’t keep making vampires, Ransome. If you do, we’re going to get caught,” Marcus warned him one night when they were hunting in the swamps outside the city for something to feed to Ransome’s latest project, a Creole prostitute named Suzette Boudrot who had been run down by a wagon near the cathedral.
“So what,” Ransome said. “What are they going to do if they find out we’re vampires—shoot us?”
“A piece of gunshot between the eyes will kill you, vampire or not,”
Marcus replied. “So will hanging.”
“They only hang runaway slaves and felons in the Place d’Armes. Worst I’d get is a day in the pillory with a placard around my neck,” Ransome retorted. “Besides, we wouldn’t have any trouble with the law at all if you would just let me make a few of the police into vampires.”
“You’re too young,” Marcus said.
“I’m older than you are,” Ransome observed.
“In human terms, yes,” Marcus replied. “But you’re still not ready to have more children of your own.” Marcus stopped himself before he could utter more de Clermont logic.
“Anyway, it’s too risky,” Marcus continued. “We’re not supposed to gather in packs. Humans notice when we do. We make them nervous, you see, and as soon as something goes wrong—”
“And it always goes wrong,” Ransome said with the voice of experience.
“Indeed,” Marcus agreed. “That’s when the humans start looking around for someone to blame for their troubles. We stick out from the crowd, just like the witches do.”
“In this city?” Ransome guffawed. “Lord, Marcus. With all the odd bodies in this town, a few vampires more or less won’t make any difference at all. Besides, aren’t you tired of saying good-bye to friends?”
The city was plagued with disease, and every month Marcus seemed to lose someone to the latest illness sweeping through the streets. Reluctantly, he nodded.
“I thought so,” Ransome said. “Besides, all I’m doing is making good on the promise of the revolution you fought to win: liberty and fraternity. Equality Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
Encouraged by Ransome’s conviction that no one would notice, and spurred on by his own need to belong, Marcus began to take note of young people who seemed destined for something greater than their sad lot in life. One by one, he started to save them.
Marcus began with Molly, the Choctaw who worked in one of Ransome’s upstairs rooms and had the voice of an angel. Was it really fair that such a beautiful young woman lose her life, not to mention her looks, because one of her customers had given her syphilis? Marcus felt having a daughter would bring respectability to the family, provide him and Ransome with a hostess in their fine house, and stop the wagging tongues of neighbors. None of these dreams came true.
He tried again with One-Eyed Jack, who ran with Lafitte’s gang of thieves before he fell down drunk onto a wrought iron finial shaped like a fleur-de-lis. The point went straight into his eye. Marcus removed the spike, but not the eyeball, and all of his blood. Then Marcus gave One-Eyed Jack enough of his own blood to bring the man back to life, though the eye never recovered. Instead, the iris turned a hard, flat black that made his pupils seem permanently dilated, and he couldn’t see out of it afterward.
After One-Eyed Jack came Geraldine, the French acrobat who could swing between balconies on Bourbon Street even before she became a vampire, and then Waldo, who dealt the cards at Ransome’s new gambling hall and could spot a cheat quicker than anyone in New Orleans. Myrna, Ransome’s neighbor, who kept too many cats and donated her clothes to the poor—even if that meant stripping down on Rue Royale and giving her bloomers to a beggar—had a heart of gold and a quixotic mind that kept them all entertained, even when the slaves revolted and the British threatened to invade the city. Marcus couldn’t let her die, though her delicate mental state wasn’t improved once she began to drink blood.
One by one Marcus’s family grew larger and more boisterous. It happened so incrementally that Marcus took no notice of it, though Marguerite D’Arcantel and her coven surely did, as did the city officials.
By the time yellow fever hit the city hard in the summer of 1817, Marcus had generated a family of two dozen men and women of all backgrounds, religions, colors, and languages in his charge, as well as three distilleries, two brothels, and Ransome’s Domino Club, which had been shut down several times only to come back to life, vampire-like, as a members-only dining establishment. Since the mayor was the first to join, it seemed unlikely that the card games and sexual liaisons that took place before and after meals would get them into trouble.
It was at the height of the epidemic that New Orleans residents began to ask questions about Marcus and his family. Why did none of them ever get sick? What was keeping them healthy, when everyone else was dying of the fever? There were rumors of voodoo, which Marcus laughed off. He was feeling comfortable in New Orleans now. Marcus liked the city, and its inhabitants. He was well-fed, happy with his work, and enjoyed his family and their fast-paced life. Sometimes Marcus worried that he and Ransome were drawing too much attention to themselves, but it was easy to shrug off those concerns and focus instead on another game of cards or a new woman in his bed.
He and Ransome were at the Domino Club, counting the night’s take while Geraldine recorded the sums in the club’s ledger, when a woman arrived at the door. She was beautiful—not just pretty, but jaw-droppingly perfect. Her mixed-race heritage showed in her softly curled hair—most of which was piled on her head while the rest fell in tendrils that clung to her neck in the humid air—her café au lait skin, and her high cheekbones.
“Marcus de Clermont.” The woman smiled like a cat.
Ransome pulled a pistol out of the desk drawer.
“Juliette.” Marcus’s heart jumped, and Geraldine looked from him to the woman at the door, curious about her effect on him.
“Hello, Marcus.” His maker, Matthew de Clemont, joined the woman. “I told you he would remember you, Juliette.”
“What are you doing here?” Marcus asked Matthew, dazed by the sudden intrusion of past into present.
“I’ve come to meet my grandchildren. They’re the talk of the town.” His voice was calm, but Matthew was clearly furious. “Will you introduce me—or should I do it myself?”
* * *
—
“I TRUST YOU KNOW my son.” Matthew poured a glass of wine for the aristocratic vampire who sat across the table. It was so polished that you could see the dark reflections in the mahogany surface.
“Everybody knows him.” The vampire, like Matthew, spoke French. Marcus’s French was excellent thanks to Fanny and Stéphanie, and living in New Orleans kept him fluent.
“I am sorry for that.” Matthew sounded genuinely regretful.
“Louis.” Juliette sailed into the room, a silk turban wrapped around her head that nonetheless allowed a few curls to escape and tumble around her delicate face and neck. Her dress was also silk, caught under her breasts in a way that accentuated her slim figure and the curve of her shoulders and bosom.
“Juliette.” Louis stood and bowed. He kissed her on both cheeks in the French manner and pulled out a chair.
“So you’ve met Matthew’s problem child.” Juliette pushed out her lower lip in a seductive pout. “He’s been very naughty, I hear. What shall we do with him?”
Matthew looked at Juliette fondly. He poured her a glass of wine.
“Thank you, my love, but I would prefer blood,” Juliette said. “Would you like a slave, Louis, or are you content with wine?”
“I have all that I require at present,” Louis said.
“We have no slaves.” Marcus had been told not to speak unless he was directly addressed by one of his elders, but he detested Juliette Durand.
“You do now.” Juliette snapped her fingers and a vacant-looking black girl walked into the room. She stumbled and nearly fell.
“Juliette. Not here,” Matthew said, a note of warning in his voice.
But Juliette ignored him.
“I’ve told you not to be so clumsy.” Juliette pointed at the floor before her. “Kneel. Offer yourself to me.”
The girl did so. There was a look of panic in her eyes, quickly shuttered. She tilted her head to the side, and once again nearly toppled over.
“How much blood have you taken from her?” Marcus leap
ed out of his chair and pulled the girl away. He examined her eyes, and felt the pulse at her wrist. It was weak, and stuttering.
“Do not touch what’s mine.” Juliette’s nails dug into his scalp as she grabbed Marcus by the hair. “This is the problem with your son, Matthew. He has no respect for age and power.”
“Put him down, Juliette,” Matthew said. “As for you, Marcus, don’t interfere in Juliette’s affairs.”
“This is my house!” Marcus shouted, keeping hold of the girl. “I won’t have a child abused in it—not for food, and not for sport.”
“We all have different tastes,” Louis said softly. “In time, you will learn to accept that.”
“Never.” Marcus looked at Matthew in disgust. “I expected better from you.”
“I’ve never touched a child,” Matthew said, his eyes darkening.
“No, but you’ll stand by and let your whore do it.”
Juliette launched herself at Marcus, her fingers raised in claws.
The child, who was caught between them, screamed in terror, her weakened heart skipping beats, slowing, then stopping. She slumped to the floor, dead.
Myrna flew into the room, wearing nothing but a corset and a pair of high-heeled slippers. Her hair was in disarray, and she held a bread knife aloft in one hand.
“The child. The child.” Myrna sobbed, her eyes wild. She began slashing at the air, left and right, slaying whatever ghosts had accompanied her into the room.
“Hush, Myrna. You’re safe. No one will harm you.” Marcus shielded Myrna from the view of the other vampires. He took off his coat and draped it around Myrna’s shaking shoulders.
“Get out of this house. All of you.” Ransome appeared, carrying a gun. One of his friends had modified the barrel, and it carried a ball and charge so large it could blow off half of a vampire’s head. Ransome called his gun “my angel.”
“I think, Monsieur de Clermont, that the time has come to do more than talk,” Louis observed with a superior sniff.
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